Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

herself completely between Nate and Libby, making a barrier of her own body (behavior she'd obviously picked up from her cow/calf studies – a humpback mother did the same thing when boats or amorous males approached her calf).
    Amy snatched the handful of CDs from Libby. "I'd better go through these. I can probably come up with a few relevant samples to play along with the slides if I hurry."
    "I'll go with you," Margaret said, eyeing Amy. "My handwriting on the catalog numbers leaves something to be desired."
    And off they went toward the projection station in the middle of the hall, leaving Nate standing with Libby, wondering exactly what had just transpired.
    "She really does have an extraordinary ass, Nate," Libby said as she watched Amy walk away.
    "Yep," Nate said, not wanting to have this conversation. "She's very bright, too."
    Sometime in the last week a tiny voice in his head had started asking, Could this get any weirder? In two minutes he'd gone from anxiety to embarrassment to anxiety to relief to gratitude to scoping chicks with his ex-wife. Oh, yes, little voice, it can always get weirder.
    "I think Margaret may be on a recruiting mission," Libby said. "I hope she checked our budget before she left."
    "Amy's working for free," Nate said.
    Libby leaned up on tiptoes and whispered, "I believe that a starting position on the all-girl team has just opened up." Then she kissed his cheek. "You knock 'em dead tonight, Nate." And she was off after Amy and Margaret.
    Clay and Kona arrived just as Libby walked away, and, irritatingly, Kona was checking out Libby from behind.
    "Irie, Boss Nate. Who's the biscuit auntie suckin' face with ya?" (Like many authentic Hawaiians, Kona called any woman a generation older "auntie," even if he was horning after her.)
    "You brought him here," Nate said to Clay without turning to face him.
    "He's got to learn," Clay said. "Libby seemed friendly."
    "She's chasing Amy."
    "Oh, she a blackheart thief that would take a man's Snowy Biscuit to have a punaani nosh. That Snowy Biscuit belong our tribe."
    "Libby was Nate's third wife," Clay volunteered, as if that would somehow immediately illuminate why the blackheart Libby was trying to steal the Snowy Biscuit from their tribe.
    "Truth?" Kona said, shaking his great gorgonation of dreadlocks in rag-doll confusion. "You married a lesbian?"
    "Whale willies," said Clay, adding neither insight nor illumination.
    "I should go over my notes," Nate said.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    A Rippin' Talk
    "Biology," said the pseudo Hawaiian, "dat bitch make sex puppets of everyone." Clay had just told him the story. The story was this:
    Five years into her marriage to Nathan Quinn, Libby had gone for the summer to the Bering Sea to put satellite-tracking tags on female right whales. She had already begun working with Margaret Painborne, who was at the time trying to find out more about the mating and gestation behavior of right whales. The best way to do that was to keep constant tabs on the females. Now, sexing whales can be an incredibly difficult task, as their genitalia, for hydrodynamic reasons, are all internal. Without a biopsy or without being in the water with the animal (which means death in three minutes in the Bering Sea), about the only way to determine sex is to catch a female when she is with her calf or while the animals are mating. Libby and Margaret had decided to tag the animals while they were mating. Their base ship was an eighty-foot schooner loaned to the project by Scripps, but to do the actually tagging they used a nimble twelve-foot Zodiac with a forty-horse engine.
    They'd spotted a female trying to evade the advances of two giant males. The right whale is one of the few animals in the world that uses a washout strategy for mating. That is, the females mate with several males, but the one who can wash out the others' seed most efficiently will pass his genes on to the next generation. Consequently, the guy with the largest tackle often wins, and male right whales have the biggest tackle in the world, with testes that weigh up to a ton and ten-foot penises that are not only long but prehensile, able to reach around a female from the side and introduce themselves on the sly.
    Libby took the front of the boat, where she braced herself with a fifteen-foot fiberglass pole tipped with a barbed stainless point attached to the satellite unit. Margaret steered the outboard, maneuvering over frigid seven-foot seas, into the position where